Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop

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Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching
Stance in the Writing Workshop
238
Exploring Inquiry
Katie Wood Ray
An inquiry approach to genre
study repositions curriculum
as the outcome of instruction
rather than as the starting
point.
On a Saturday afternoon in January,
Emily Steffans went to the library and
began searching through the most
recent back issues of familiar newspapers and magazines. Emily was preparing to launch a study of op-ed writing
in her fifth-grade writing workshop,
and she wanted to find some good
examples of this kind of writing for
the study. She was looking for op-ed
pieces by columnists who explore topics she thought might interest her students. The daily offering of opinions
about what’s happening in our lives is
found in these columns, often published with the writer’s photograph
beside them so readers can see the
“voice” behind the writing. Randy
Bomer (1995) has said that this type of
writing is where “our society entertains
its most important conversations”
(p. 185). The writing in op-ed columns
ranges from reflective commentary—
sometimes poignant, sometimes
humorous, sometimes both—to the
clear, staunch positioning of editorials.
Language Arts,
Vol. 83 No. 3, January 2006
Copyright © 2006 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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The teacher, often along with students, gathers examples of the kind of writing students
will do.
Set the Stage:
The teacher explains that students will be expected to finish a piece of writing that shows
the influence of the study.
Immersion:
The teacher and students spend time reading and getting to know the texts they’ll study.
They make notes of things they notice about how the texts are written. They think about
the process writers use to craft texts like the ones they are studying.
Close Study:
The class revisits the texts, framing talk with the question, “What did we notice about how
these texts are written?” Teacher and students work together to use specific language to
say what they know about writing from this close study, developing curriculum as they go.
The teacher, through modeling, takes a strong lead in helping students envision using what
they are learning in their own writing.
Writing under
the Influence:
Students (and often the teacher) finish pieces of writing that show the influence of the
study in specific ways.
Figure 1. An instructional frame for inquiry about writing
AN INQUIRY STANCE
TO TEACHING
Emily was part of a group of literacy
coaches and teachers who came
together during the 2003–2004 school
year to study curriculum and instruction in writing workshops across a
range of grade levels. As the consultant to the group, I chose to focus our
work around an instructional frame
for whole-class inquiry that would
allow us to study a wide variety of
genres (Bomer, 1995; Calkins, 1994;
Lattimer, 2003) along with writing
issues other than genre (Nia, 1999),
such as punctuation (Angelillo, 2002),
and how to make illustrations work
well with written texts (Ray, with
Cleaveland, 2004). Figure 1 outlines
this instructional frame.
Framing instruction in this way
represents an essential stance to
teaching and learning, an inquiry
stance, characterized by repositioning curriculum as the outcome of
instruction rather than as the starting point. In this particular set of
practices, the noticing and questioning that students engage in around
the gathered texts determine what
will become important content in
the study (the teacher doesn’t determine this in advance), and depth
rather than coverage is the driving
force in the development of this
content. The idea of “uncovering
curriculum” through inquiry is certainly not new (Harste, 1992; Short
& Harste, with Burke, 1996; Short,
Schroeder, Laird, Kauffman, Ferguson, & Crawford, 1996; Whitin &
Whitin, 1997) but it seems to have
taken hold more as a teaching
stance in integrated, content area
studies. In these studies, writing is
used as a tool for learning and as a
means to communicate that
learning, but in the instructional
frame outlined above, an inquiry
stance is used to uncover
curriculum about writing itself.
The purpose of this article is to
explain the reasons I believe in the
efficacy of an inquiry stance in the
teaching of writing and to examine
some related issues. But before I do
that, I’ll return to the story of Emily
Steffans and her study of op-ed writing. In addition to the nine days I
spent with her and other teachers last
year, Emily and I have continued to
share thinking about teaching in email exchanges. My own understand-
ings about inquiry have deepened
from these exchanges. My hope is that
this snapshot of her study will bring
life to the framework for inquiry outlined above and serve as a powerful
example of it in action.
A FIFTH-GRADE STUDY
OF OP-ED WRITING
At the end of her search, Emily had
six op-ed columns she felt could
anchor her study (see Figure 2) and
two writers who would become mentors for her students: Leonard Pitts of
The Miami Herald (winner of the 2004
Pulitzer prize for commentary) and
Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated (voted
“National Sportswriter of the Year”
eight times). The topics of the columns
she selected ranged from Reilly’s
thoughts on whether 14-year-old
Freddy Adu is ready for a professional
soccer career, to Pitts’s boisterous
commentary on how absurd he finds
PJ Squares (ready-made layers for
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches),
which ends with this thought: “If
you’re too busy to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you’re too
busy.” Emily photocopied the texts she
had selected and made each of her
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Exploring Inquiry
Gathering Texts:
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• “Ready-made sandwich just too convenient” by Leonard Pitts. The Miami Herald. Posted on November 17,
2003. Explores the issues of a time-pressed society and how we can take time-saving conveniences to ridiculous extremes.
• “Ready Freddy” by Rick Reilly. Sports Illustrated. December 1, 2003. Considers whether 14-year-old soccer
phenom Freddy Adu is ready to play in a professional soccer league.
• “Worth the wait” by Rick Reilly. Sports Illustrated. October 20, 2003. The story of a 16-year-old with cerebral palsy who runs track for his high school team and reflections on what this story says about life.
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• “A year in the life of broken-down technology” by Leonard Pitts. The Miami Herald. Posted on December
1, 2003. Commentary on the high price we sometimes pay for the conveniences of technology in our lives.
Exploring Inquiry
• “Expert testimony” by Rick Reilly. Sports Illustrated. October 13, 2003. One of a number of Reilly’s
columns on the ongoing problems between Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal of the LA Lakers.
• “The fat of the land” by Rick Reilly. Sports Illustrated. September 16, 2003. Reilly’s thoughts on the
sedentary lifestyles of many young people and the connection they have to obesity problems.
Figure 2. Texts Emily selected to anchor her study of op-ed writing
fifth graders a packet with their own
copies for study.
Op-Ed pieces might . . .
• ask questions to introduce a topic (start with a lot, then use the op-ed
piece to answer them)
• use repeating lines
• shorten topic sentences into one word (more appealing to the reader)
• use one-word questions for first sentence
• exaggerate to really make a point or add humor
• compare the topic to something else (doesn’t use the actual word to
describe)
• use sarcasm when appropriate
• use lists of adjectives to describe
• interview people related to topic or use quotes from others
• “pull out” a quote and make it bigger
• give solutions if the topic presents a problem
• insert small paragraphs of comments/opinion in between longer
paragraphs
• use plain humor
• wait to introduce the topic until the middle so the reader doesn’t stop
reading because of the topic
• admit when the writer doesn’t know the topic
• end with a very personal comment/opinion/idea
• point fingers at people/things that are causes of the problem—but
sometimes not directly
• use a title that grabs interest, but doesn’t give the topic
• use shocking facts
• use bullets to call attention to ideas
• change point of view if the goal was to make you think
• use personal comparisons
• give facts, both pro and con
Over the next few weeks in writing
workshop, Emily and her students
immersed themselves in reading and
rereading these texts along with
other op-ed pieces the students found
and added to their packets. They used
sticky notes and highlighters and
notes in the margins to mark what
they noticed about how they were
written (Ray, 1999). As they came
together each day, they charted their
observations (see Figure 3) and used
talk to deepen their understandings
about how op-ed writing is crafted
effectively. Along the way, they
found specific lines of inquiry they
wanted to follow, such as why questions are such a common strategy in
op-ed pieces and the role of humor
in this kind of writing. Emily often
modeled how she could try these
various techniques in her own writing. Sometimes she invited the children to try things out with her in
their writer’s notebooks.
As the inquiry progressed, students
were also considering topics for the
op-ed pieces they would eventually
write. Much of this idea-building
happened in their writer’s notebooks,
Language Arts,
Figure 3. Chart of observations from the inquiry
Vol. 83 No. 3, January 2006
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but it also grew from lots of talk and
research about their topics. Studying
their touchstone texts (Calkins, 1994;
Nia, 1999) gave them a feel for what
kind of information they would
need—quotes, statistics, etc.
After lots of study and conferring and
time spent fine-tuning their drafts as
best they could, Emily’s fifth graders
celebrated writing their very first oped columns, a kind of writing new to
most of them only five short weeks
before. They had chosen to write
about the dangers of low-carb diets,
the risks of Internet chat rooms, the
controversies of program funding in
their local school district, and a rich
variety of other topics. Because of the
natural range of development in the
room, there was certainly a range in
quality of writing, but Emily simply
let each of her students write an op-ed
piece as well as he or she could, and
in doing so, made the task achievable
for all of them. Figures 4 and 5 show
two of her students’ columns, selected
because they represent a range of
development.
Reflecting on the work the class did
as a whole, Emily told me that what
she loved most was that the op-ed
columns really looked like fifth
graders wrote them, and they “just
sounded so editorial-y.”
OTHER POSSIBLE
TEACHING STANCES
Before I explain why I believe an
inquiry stance makes sense, I should
explain the teaching alternatives to
inquiry. One alternative is not to connect the teaching to any real-world (as
opposed to school-world) examples of
writing at all. Students are given a
generic definition of the kind of writing they are to do, such as persuasive
What will we do?
I was just thinking about all the things going on in Columbia. It’s sort of like what’s going on in the country
Columbia, with all the drug wars. But thankfully in our city it isn’t drugs, but the 4th or 5th Walmart, all the construction and all the crazy bike lanes. You know: city stuff.
But why Walmart just about a mile from another one? Is it for the Laurie’s and Kronke’s view or convenience?
Our Lowe’s is so small compared to St. Louis, who probably has the same amount of Walmarts as us. Think
about that Walmart.
But then again what’s the big deal? Yes, it’s a stupid idea, but think about it: It’s a WALMART!!!!!! There’s no
stopping Walmart. Nobody revolted to putting bike lanes in crazy places. Nobody revolted to building those
huge apartments behind Smithton! Since when did the smiling yellow guy become everybody’s enemy?
Oh, and did you know that Sam Walton once said that if people wanted Walmart out of there, then they would
get out of there? Bye, bye Sam, bye, bye rollback dude, bye bye Walmart.
Guess what? Forget about that because they’re still building it. Soon our town is going to be in the Guiness
Book of World Records for most Walmarts per person! Yep, West Broadway is officially a non-smiley face free
zone. Sign and all. But it could still be that somebody revolts or something happens. That’ll be the day for the
people who have a homemade sign that looks like this:
instead of this: No Walmart on West Broadway
:)
:)
Walmart on West Broadway
Yes, they are even selling signs for about 5$ that protest against Walmart.
What will it be like in the future? How many of “Sam Walton’s Paradises” will we have in Columbia? Hopefully
not many more.
Figure 4. Student’s finished (to the best of his ability) op-ed piece about a new Walmart
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Exploring Inquiry
Because Emily’s students knew they
were expected to write something
similar to what they had been reading, something that could take its
place in their packet of op-ed
columns, their inquiry had that wonderful sense of urgency that writers
who are expected to write something
know so well. When I visited her
workshop in February, there was an
almost tangible feeling of living
toward something in the room, reminiscent of the feeling a class has
when they are going on a trip or
putting on a play. And because
Emily had chosen such amazing
writers to mentor her students, there
seemed also to be a feeling among
them that what they would eventually write was going to be good.
Many wanted to start their drafts
right away, but Emily held them off
until the inquiry progressed enough
that she felt they had a strong vision
for the writing they would do.
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Should We Look Up To Him?
Why do people look up to Shaq. Why doesn’t shaqs teammates respect him.
Shaq doesn’t get along with he’s teammates. Why I don’t really know. But I know why he doesn’t get alone with
kobe. Because when kobe was injured kobe was talking a lot about shaq but shaq was not going for thet so he
was sending bad messages back to kobe.
242
Why do you think Shaq would lose he’s job. Well I think that shaq would lose his job because of arguing and
threaning his teammates. I think his coach would not put up with it. And he would just throw him out of the
game.
Exploring Inquiry
Why do you think that shaq does not play well. To give you an example he does more of arguing then playing.
But don’t get me wrong he can put on a show for you.
I think that shaq shouldn’t be on tv because of he’s temper problem. You would never know if the camera guy
messes up and he start yelling at him.
Why do you think kids look up to him? Only why I look up to him is because he is a good player. But he can be
a bad in flues for kids.
Figure 5. Student’s finished (to the best of his ability) op-ed piece about Shaquille O’Neal
writing: “trying to convince a reader
of your point of view on an issue.”
This is sometimes followed by having
students fill in a graphic organizer,
modeling writing, or leading the class
in writing together before asking students to write their own.
Another alternative to inquiry is to
use quality, real-world examples of
writing only to highlight features they
want students to attend to in the
texts. In this case, teachers have determined ahead of time which aspects of
the writing they will be teaching and
usually have selected their examples
carefully to show these predetermined
features. This teaching, which often
includes teacher modeling, usually
happens in a series of directed lessons.
With this alternative, it is possible to
plan a series of lessons ahead of time,
and even to package them for use in
other classrooms.
And then there’s inquiry that grows
from studying well-written texts with
students. The reality is, of course,
that teaching often overlaps all three
of these approaches at different times
in different ways. What matters most
is what the basic stance to the teaching will be. Emily’s basic stance was
to generate the curriculum through
Language Arts,
inquiry with her students, a stance I
see as a critical teaching decision.
READING LIKE WRITERS
When teachers immerse students in
reading and studying the kind of
writing they want them to do, they
are actually teaching at two levels.
They teach students about the particular genre or writing issue that is the
focus of the study, but they also
teach students to use a habit of mind
that experienced writers engage in all
the time. They teach them how to
read like writers (Smith, 1988), noticing as an insider how things are
written. Students learn to look at
texts the way a mechanic looks at
cars or a musician listens to music, to
use the particular knowledge system
of a writer (Harste, 1992). Over time,
they learn to notice things about
writing that other people (who don’t
write) don’t notice, and all along the
way this noticing helps them develop
a vision for the writing they will do.
If Emily had done all the noticing for
her students, pointing out the
features she wanted them to see in
the gathered texts, they would have
had no reason to learn to notice text
features themselves.
Vol. 83 No. 3, January 2006
Writers—even experienced writers—
will tell you that reading the genre
they are getting ready to write is a
lifelong habit. In the past two years,
I’ve had to read in this very specific
way on three different occasions:
twice because I was planning to write
in a new genre for me (a foreward
and an abstract), and once because I
was writing for a journal I don’t normally read. In this case, the genre—a
professional article—was familiar, but
genre is more than just form, it’s also
a “social category” (Kress, 1999). I
wasn’t a part of the “society” that
reads this journal, so I read back issues
to get a feel for it. I was reading to get
a clear vision for the kind of thing I
wanted to write, and it’s the kind of
reading Emily was teaching her fifth
graders to do with their inquiry.
When I think about an inquiry stance,
I always feel like this reason alone—
inquiry teaches students to read and
think like writers—is reason enough to
teach from this stance as often as possible. Why? Because so many professional writers give the same advice
when asked what a person should do
to become a writer—you have to read,
they say. It is discipline-based inquiry
(Berghoff, Borgmann, & Parr, 2003)
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that puts reading at the forefront of
the teaching and lets students
develop a knowledge base about
good writing in the same way professional writers develop theirs.
GROUNDED TEACHING
When the first move in inquiry is to
gather real-world texts, it provides
some insurance that the teaching
will be grounded and, for lack of a
better word, true. Inevitably, when
teachers teach writing without any
writing attached to it, they end up
teaching things that just aren’t true,
or at least they aren’t true all the
time. Edgar Schuster (2004) calls
these things “mythrules.” Anyone
who has moved from a delivery
stance to an inquiry stance has stories to tell about having to reconsider the content of his or her
teaching. Take, for example, the conventional rule so many of us learned
about persuasive writing—state the
main idea in the first paragraph and
then give the reasons for holding
that idea in subsequent paragraphs.
But if you actually look at writing of
this kind, lots of it isn’t written this
way at all. Writers sometimes don’t
state their main idea until the very
end, and sometimes they state it
right in the middle as a turning
point in the text.
When teachers give
students a simple way
to write something,
not only are they not
true to the product,
they aren’t true to the
process either.
Leonard Pitts (2003) is doing in this
excerpt from a column about the
Shaquille O’Neal/Kobe Bryant feud
over whose team the Lakers is:
Sometimes, I think you forget that.
You and all the other millionaires
who show up at games driving dream
cars and leave them trailing dream
women. Sometimes, I think you forget
what it means when I allow you the
privilege of coming into my home.
The privilege of my support. (p. A10)
Pitts makes his sentences work
together, sharing understood
connections, giving the writing the
sound of someone sort of holding
forth on an issue, adding a little
more “punch” to a point as an
afterthought. He and other writers
of op-ed pieces do this kind of language work all the time. When
teachers teach writing with no writing attached to it, they rarely (if
ever) teach that about it, and yet it’s
such a big part of what people who
do this kind of writing know well.
In an inquiry stance, teachers let the
writing itself shape and define what
the content will be, and they are willing to accept the gray area that comes
with that. “Inquiry does not narrow
our perspective; it gives us more
understandings, questions, and possibilities than when we started” (Short,
Schroeder, Laird, Kauffman, Ferguson,
& Crawford, 1996, p. 8). There isn’t just
one way to write an op-ed piece, and
there aren’t just a few simple things to
know about this kind of writing. By
nature, the content is expansive,
nuanced, and full of alternatives. And
if teachers try to change it into something simpler because the students are,
after all, just ten and eleven years old
and doing this kind of writing for the
first time, they end up teaching something that just doesn’t ring true.
I understand that when teaching is
simplified, when children are given a
graphic organizer and a few simple
guidelines to follow, they sometimes
produce tighter, more polished-looking
products than the writing I typically
see when students write out of
inquiry. But when this happens, the
very nature of what is being taught
has fundamentally changed because
writing doesn’t exist like that in the
world outside school. Edgar Schuster
(2004) says he’s been looking for a
five-paragraph theme in published
materials since he started teaching in
1958 and has yet to find a single one.
When teachers give students a simple way to write something, not only
are they not true to the product,
they aren’t true to the process either.
Outside of school, when faced with
tasks that require composition, writers have to figure out how to write
things. No one gives them a formula,
and the struggle to organize and
make everything work together is
there anew every time. It is an
essential part of the writing process.
In an inquiry stance, teachers help
children explore these different alternatives for how to write something,
and then they let them do what writers really have to do—make decisions
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Exploring Inquiry
John Dewey (1938) contends, “Anything which can be called a study,
whether arithmetic, history, geography, or one of the natural sciences,
must be derived from materials
which at the outset fall within the
scope of ordinary life-experience”
(p. 73). While Dewey doesn’t include
writing in his list, I believe his contention points to the significance of
gathering real-world texts for
inquiry. The kind of writing Emily
wanted to study certainly exists
“within the scope of ordinary life
experience,” so there was no need to
look outside that scope for materials.
There are so many examples like
this, particularly in the realm of
usage issues. The truth is, writers of
op-ed pieces (and many other kinds
of writing) often purposefully
exploit usage at so many turns as a
way of creating voice in their texts
(Fletcher, 1993; Romano, 2004). For
example, that’s exactly what
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Exploring Inquiry
about how their pieces will go. Does
this make it harder on students? Perhaps. But when teachers simply ask
them to do it as well as they can and
understand that it will take lots of
experience for them to get really
good at it, it makes it achievable.
Then, while students are getting that
experience, they are grounded in the
realities of real-world writing, both
product and process.
EXPANDING
KNOWLEDGE BASE
As Emily reflected on her study of
op-ed writing, she felt she had
learned as much as, if not more
than, her students. I know this to be
true from my own experience with
inquiry, and I have heard this
reflection echoed often from other
teachers. If Emily (or any other
teacher) had begun the study by
planning out what she wanted to
teach from her existing knowledge
base, the study would necessarily
have been limited to what she
knows. And so often as teachers, we
don’t even realize how limited our
knowledge base is until we engage
in inquiry with our students.
we embrace it or not—because to be
content experts in every single genre
of writing, on every aspect of craft,
and on every writing process issue
that arises is a tall order. But recognizing that we don’t have the
content expertise we’d like to have
in writing doesn’t have to limit our
teaching or our students’ learning.
We can have instructional expertise
instead. Instructional frameworks
help teachers plan and implement
generative inquiries that can be used
to study any aspect of writing. The
stack of texts changes, but the way
the inquiry happens stays basically
the same.
Over time, of course, content
expertise is certainly a by-product
of instructional expertise. Emily
knows a lot more about writing oped pieces than she did before this
inquiry, and from future studies,
she’ll learn even more. As a matter
of fact, she’ll likely come to a place
where she could deliver a heady,
interesting series of lessons on how
to do this kind of writing, attach
them all to real-world text
examples, and not engage in
inquiry with her students at all. But
she’s not likely to do this. In their
Taking the inquiry out of the teaching would
diminish students’ need to read and think like
writers, and would most likely diminish their
understanding as well.
I believe it’s a good thing for us as
teachers to feel like we’re learning as
much as our students during inquiry.
As Kathy Short and Carolyn Burke
(1991) point out, “For any curricular
framework to be useful and generative, it must support all learners in
the community (adults and children)
in inquiry” (p. 68). And as teachers
of writing, we need inquiry—whether
Language Arts,
wonderful book Understanding by
Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay
McTighe (2001) say, “If students are
to understand what is known, they
need to simulate or recreate some of
the inquiry by which the knowledge
was created” (p. 33). Taking the
inquiry out of the teaching would
diminish students’ need to read and
think like writers, and would most
Vol. 83 No. 3, January 2006
likely diminish their understanding
as well. They would think of their
writing instruction as “business as
usual” and simply wait for the
teacher to tell them what she knows,
never understanding how that
knowledge came to be.
The content expertise that teachers
acquire as they engage in inquiry
with students over time is not
wasted, however. Conferring, the
one-on-one teaching of individual
writers in a workshop, is greatly
enhanced as the teacher’s knowledge
base grows (Anderson, 2000; Ray,
with Laminack, 2001). Quite simply,
the more teachers know about craft
and genre and process, the better
they can confer because they have
more to offer their students. Content
expertise also helps teachers develop
minilessons that support the work
students do out of the inquiry. Most
teachers use the time when students
are drafting and revising to teach
whole-class lessons on writing issues
that might help students write well
but, for whatever reason, weren’t
significant issues in the close study.
Perhaps most important, a growing
knowledge base gives teachers “new
eyes” to see what students are trying
to do in their writing. In the op-ed
piece about Shaq and Kobe, for example, Emily understood and appreciated
Germion’s goals in framing the piece
with questions and answers—a
crafting technique the class had
learned was used frequently in op-ed
pieces. Germion was quite intentional
in his efforts to use the technique in
his own writing. If Emily hadn’t
recognized this, she might have been
struck more by what he didn’t do in
his piece than by what he did. I am
moved by the profound implications
of this for the writing lives of children,
what it could mean to them if their
teachers developed the eyes to see and
appreciate what they are trying to do
as writers instead of—or at least in
addition to—what they haven’t done.
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BEFORE REVISION, VISION
Sometimes teachers get frustrated
with students because they don’t
seem to know what to do with revision, but I think it’s worth asking,
“Have I done enough to help my students develop a strong vision for the
writing I’d like them to do?” Writers
write well, often even in first drafts,
when they have a clear vision for the
kind of writing they will do. The
immersion stage of inquiry is
absolutely critical to the development
of this vision, and its absence in the
other two stances to the teaching of
writing is problematic.
Even when a series of lessons is tied
directly to high-quality, real-world
text examples, if there isn’t a period
of just reading from a range of
texts, I don’t believe students get
the fullness of vision that comes
from immersion (Cambourne, 1988).
Lessons like these are designed to
draw students’ attention to specific
qualities in the writing before they
have had a chance to just read and
get a feel—in a much larger, more
visionary sense—for what this kind
of writing is like in the world.
Lessons like these also narrow the
possibilities for the features of texts
students might attend to in their
reading, forcing students “to oper-
WHAT ABOUT
TEACHER MODELING?
The importance of students seeing
their teachers both writing and modeling writing is well documented in
the professional literature about the
teaching of writing (Atwell, 1998;
Graves, 1989; Routman, 2005). The
What Emily was
modeling was the
process she wanted her
students to go through
rather than the product
she wanted them to
produce.
modeling a teacher does, however,
looks different depending on which
teaching stance is taken. Sometimes
when teachers write, they are trying
to create a model—more the noun
sense of the word than the verb
sense. They want their writing to
serve as a model for what the
students will write. But when teachers
work from an inquiry stance, they
have decided that the model for the
writing will come from the stack of
gathered texts. And of course it’s not
just one model—there’s a stack of
texts there—which is why the word
vision is probably a better word for
what they want their students to
have.
When quality texts anchor the teaching, students don’t need their teachers
to create a model of what the writing
should look like, but this doesn’t
mean that modeling isn’t important.
As the inquiry progressed, Emily
showed her students how to take what
they were learning and turn it into
possibilities for their own writing. She
let them inside her head as she made
decisions while creating her own oped piece. What Emily was modeling
was the process she wanted her
students to go through rather than the
product she wanted them to produce.
By modeling the process of moving
from the study of texts to their own
writing, Emily showed her students
the “value of the discipline required
to learn a discipline” (Wiggins &
McTighe, 2001, p. 55). And in a very
real way, what Emily was really
teaching her students was how to
carry on with their learning without
needing her. Because she modeled
“off” whatever they found in their
inquiry and not from her own predetermined qualities of good writing,
the students could see how it is that a
writer learns to write from reading
rather than from teaching.
PURPOSEFUL,
PLANFUL TEACHING
At the beginning of her study, Emily
could not have named the specifics of
the content her students would
uncover over the course of the next
five weeks. But this doesn’t mean that
her teaching was an act of faith or
whimsy, or that Emily wasn’t incredibly purposeful about what she wanted
to come from this inquiry. The development of curriculum she undertook
with her students was “structured for
surprise” (Graves, 2001, p. 51).
First, she had very specific, guiding
questions she wanted the study to
address:
• What kinds of topics are appropriate
for op-ed pieces?
• What kinds of prewriting work do
writers of op-ed pieces do?
• How are op-ed pieces crafted in ways
that make them compelling for readers?
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Exploring Inquiry
Emily understood how important it
was to choose good examples for her
study because whatever ended up in
her stack of texts would form the
vision toward which her students
would draft. Once they were immersed in reading these texts, this
vision would take shape and would
be critical to the whole of the
process, but particularly to the drafting and revising the students would
eventually do. Emily knew that it
would be difficult for her students to
revise if they didn’t have a vision to
start with. Elliott Eisner (2003) says,
“The writer starts with vision and
ends with words” (p. 342).
ate within the teacher’s assumptive
bounds” (Harste, Woodward, &
Burke, 1984, p. 14) instead of
exploring other possibilities they
might find on their own.
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Second, while perhaps it required
some faith the first time she
engaged in inquiry with students,
Emily’s experience has led her to
expect that her blank chart will fill
up with students’ observations, and
her instructional expertise helps her
turn those observations into
content-specific understandings,
strategies, and techniques that
address her guiding questions and
that her students can use to gain
increasing competence as writers.
And so, for all of the reasons why
the design of this teaching is
critical, Emily was comfortable to
wait and see what would emerge as
important content in the study.
Finally, while it may seem at odds
with this “wait and see” stance to
content development, Emily was also
very planful about the course the
study would take. She engaged in
what Dorothy Watson called “planning to plan” (Watson, Burke, &
Harste, 1989). Knowing that studies
of this kind aim for depth, not coverage, Emily determined in advance
approximately how much time she
would devote to each phase of the
inquiry. Close study, particularly, can
go on and on without some time
parameters. She also developed short
assessments to help her students
pace themselves through the work of
the study and to help her keep a
handle on their progress. Figure 6
shows the three assessments she
used during the study.
I believe it is incredibly important
that teachers are clear and
articulate about their purposes and
planning in inquiry. Sometimes
there is a misconception from those
who haven’t experienced this kind
of teaching that it is somehow
“loose” or, perhaps worse, that it
lacks rigor. Everyone with a vested
interest in the teaching needs to be
kept informed about the plans and
the progress of the study. Often, students and their contagious enthusiasm are the best harbingers when it
comes to helping others understand
what’s happening in the classroom.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
I began this article by saying I
wanted to explain the reasons I
believe in the efficacy of an inquiry
stance in the teaching of writing.
Efficacy. My Webster’s has only one
definition for this word: the power to
produce an effect. I chose this word
with great care, and it would be irresponsible to use it without naming
the effects I believe an inquiry stance
has the power to produce. In many
ways, effects were layered into my
reasoning all along—developing
habits of mind, clearer visions for
writing, etc. I’d like to close with my
thoughts on several other effects I
believe are possible when a consistent inquiry stance is taken in the
First assessment: Early in the study
• Describe the topic you have chosen for your op-ed piece. Explain it in detail and tell why you have chosen it.
• What material do you already have in your notebook related to your topic? When you finish these questions,
put this sheet in your notebook where your topic is.
• Write about the plans for notebook work you want to do to support you in writing your op-ed piece.
Second assessment: As students are drafting
• What op-ed techniques did you use in your editorial? Why did you choose them? Was there an op-ed piece
we read that you found particularly helpful to you as a writer?
• Take me to the places in your draft where you tried specific techniques. Put a number by each spot. Walk me
through your thinking about using them. Pay special attention here to helping me see how you used what we
learned in the study to help you as you drafted.
• What revision have you started already? Did you find yourself changing parts as you wrote them? Have you
read it aloud to yourself or to someone else? If you have not done any revising yet, what strategies do you
think you’ll use?
Third assessment: As students were revising and editing
• You should have read your draft aloud. Tell me what you found out about your draft as you did this. Be specific.
• Take me to the places where you revised. Put a number by each spot. Walk me through your thinking about
the changes you made and why you made them.
• Now, editing. As you edited, what types of mistakes did you notice? Was there one type of mistake you
noticed more than another? Why do you think that’s so?
Figure 6. Emily’s three assessments for monitoring pace and progress
Language Arts,
Vol. 83 No. 3, January 2006
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teaching of writing. I believe an
inquiry stance can produce:
• students who are prepared to meet
the demands of writing in a world
with constantly evolving conventions and expectations, because
what they know about writing is
not static; they’ve learned how to
learn about writing.
• teachers who are energized by the
teaching of writing, rather than
exhausted and frustrated by it,
because they are learning and
growing with their students.
• teachers who are empowered to
demand their right to teach writing
in ways that make sense for
children, because they have become
more articulate about what they
know about writing.
• an even greater understanding that
writing, in addition to being a tool
for learning in content areas, also
has a content of its own, one which
includes strategies for engaging in
the process of writing, but also
techniques of genre, form, and style.
• a greater “integrity of our
discipline” (Schuster, 2004) as curriculum is aligned more closely with
writing in the world outside school.
This last effect leaves us with the
enormous challenge of reforming
standards and accountability to reflect
this same integrity of discipline. My
worry is that, at so many turns, reformation seems to happen in the opposite direction. My peace of mind
comes from knowing lots of people
with plenty of stamina who’ll keep
working to turn it around.
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Author Biography
Katie Wood Ray is a professional
consultant and the author or coauthor of
five books on the teaching of writing.
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• students who read more critically
because they have so much experience thinking about the decision
making of the people behind the
texts they read.
References